It’s been some days since the Mac celebrated it’s 25th anniversary. Read the stories of the readers of CNET.com writing about their memories of the best computer ever, The Macintosh.

Also by CNET, a gallery of photos of Mac through the years.

I usually use two wireless networks, my home and university, to browse Internet.

In my university I have been assigned a specific IP address and connect to the Internet through a proxy server where as at home I simply let my router assign me settings via DHCP. On a Mac, it is really easy to make a profile for a specific network rather than input the settings manually every time (Windows eh..) we are in a different network. We can make as many network profiles as we need to and assign the network settings in them. So whenever you go to the particular location, just select the profile from the network preference pane. It’s that simple!

Let’s see how:

Select the ‘Network’ pane from System Preferences.

In the ‘Locations’ drop down menu, select the option ‘Edit Locations’.

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Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X : The Principle of Least Surprise by Jim Menard

While watching videos on the Internet or reading a document, it’s very annoying to have your Mac automatically dim the screen. Of course we can change that in the preferences but it’s such a hassle turning it back on or off.

Caffeine is a tiny application (240 KB) that puts an icon in the menu bar which can be clicked to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Clicking it again turns it off. It’s that simple!

Since the rollout of Leopard update 10.5.6 it is now possible to enable the four finger gestures that the new ‘unibody MacBook Pro’ has built in. It is a very simple process and should work for everybody if you follow the instructions correctly. I myself did it and it worked perfectly well.

The AnandTech staff compared the 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz models of MacBook Pro back in February which are the same processors offered in the recent releases as well. The MacBook Pro has 2.4GHz or 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processors with 3MB or 6MB L2 cache respectively.

I really like this application (for Mac) Keycue; it helps you to use the Mac OS X applications more effectively by displaying a concise table of all currently available menu shortcuts.

This one is an article by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine who were one of the first retailers to deal with the ‘new in the business’ Apple Computer in the late 1970s. In their own words by the magazine:

Stan Veit, Editor in Chief Emeritus of Computer Shopper, was the Editor in Chief of Computer Shopper magazine from 1983 to 1988, and Editor in Chief/Publisher from 1988 to 1990. Well before that, he was intimately connected to the personal computer revolution, a pioneer in the computer retail business who dealt with many of the industry’s movers and shakers (as well as many now-forgotten luminaries). Here, in the first in a series, he relates his experiences with two Steves, founders of a certain well-known computer behemoth…

Read it here.

These are some screen-shots from the OS X Leopard in action on my Mac. Click each picture for a larger view.

Desktop - OS X Leopard

iTunes for music

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Now that I have made the switch to Mac OS X, I am updating my list of applications (previous post) that I use for technical as well as general purposes. When it comes to ‘getting the job done’, these applications are of great value.

• Operating System – OS X Leopard
• Integrated Development Environment - Xcode, Netbeans 6.5, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (on XP Pro using VMware Fusion), Adobe Dreamweaver, TextMate, Terminal
• Languages – VB.NET, Ruby, C, C++, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, Javascript
• Content Manegment System – Joomla
• FTP client – FileZilla
• Blog – WordPress
• Blog Publishing – Windows Live Writer (this one has really no substitute, its excellent, although i have to run it virtually)
• Backup – Time Machine, Mozy Home
• Browser – Safari, Firefox and IE7 (for testing only)
• Mail Client – Mail
• Antivirus – Don’t need it anymore, yippie
• Firewall – Doorstop X Firewall for Mac
• Graphics Program – Adobe Photoshop
• Photo Editor – Aperture
• Others – VMware Fusion ( I Use it to bootup XP Pro or Ubuntu 8.10 virtually), iWork, Office 2007 (virtually), Evernote (for the mac it’s an excellent alternate of OneNote), Adium (all chat clients signed at once)